From bad to worse, France is not going well

As soon as August 2015, Cyceon wrote that in spite of strong qualities, “President François Hollande’s France” was “in a tight spot”. In addition to an economic and social crisis that seemed endless while the European Union (EU) as a whole was recovering, several terrorist attacks have traumatized France since then and the sudden agglomeration of discontent could announce further destabilization in the near future.

Labor unions, which represent 9% of the total workforce, staged demonstrations that witnessed serious assaults against police forces, blocked oil refineries and called for general strike. The shy economic recovery sketched out by latest statistics now seems compromised and the apparent incapacity of the government to contain the social movement during full state of emergency worries the population as for the possibility of more islamist attacks.

This is also and once again France’s reputation around the world that is being gravely damaged after a report showed its attractiveness fell far behind Germany’s and UK’s. In a context where the honest hard-working citizen, a generous contributor of one of the most expensive and most solidary fiscal system in the world, thinks of exile sometimes, the IMF recommendation that the government goes further than the El Khomri law seems highly difficult to achieve. At the center of a more and more questioned and rejected EU, the future of France is at stake.